The following article appeared in the New Zealand Herald on 13
August. We prepared it in response to an article published on 6 August,
by Sanford Managing Director Eric Barratt. We also provide a link to the original Sanford comment.

Seabed mining claims red herrings

By Chris Castle, 5:30 AM Tuesday Aug 13, 2013, Photo / Janna Dixon

Let's get one thing straight. Chatham Rock Phosphate wouldn't be
considering extracting phosphate nodules from a tiny fraction - less than 1 per
cent - of the Chatham Rise if we thought it was going to have adverse
environmental impacts.

Our proposed environmental footprint is minuscule relative to the
fishing industry's. But while bottom trawling requires no environmental
consents, we need both a mining licence and marine consent, costing millions of
dollars and years of research, consultation and official process, and involving
full public scrutiny.

Like fishing, our industry will be of significant economic benefit. New
Zealand will be $900 million richer as a result of our developing this new
industry and we'll be generating exports or import substitution of $300 million
each year.

In contrast the EIA notes bottom trawling has a significant impact on
the environment. Total areas trawled on the Chatham Rise (an area of
188,000km2) were estimated to be 125,744km2 for the 10 years from 1989/90. The
annual trawl footprint on the Rise during the 2009/10 fishing year alone was
19,051 km2.

In contrast, Chatham's phosphate extraction means any particular area of
the seabed will be affected only once, affecting about 30km2 of seabed each
year and about 450km2 over 15 years.

Our operations simply temporarily lift the top 30cm of sandy silt and
redeposit 85 per cent of it after extracting the nodules - the net effect on
the sea floor is it's lowered by about 5cm. There's no "open pit" as
a result of our activities.

The economic value of the phosphate resource is more than 500 times
greater on a square kilometre basis than fishing.

Our product is expected to yield $9.1 million per km2. Bottom trawling
yields less than $20,000 per km2.

Our extraction process is designed to minimise the environmental impact
and includes exclusion zones to protect representative areas of benthic habitat.

The fishing industry has ignored the scientific evidence Chatham has
provided about the environmental effects of our proposed operations.

Barratt makes many staggeringly inaccurate claims. Among these is his
wild overstatement that our extraction "is the equivalent of a small
mountain like Mt Victoria in Wellington every day". The material extracted
each day would actually cover a quarter-acre section to a depth of 1.5m.

Nor are our processes untested. All the techniques proposed for our
extraction are routinely used in dredging around the world. The only new thing
is undertaking this work at 400m.

This project is important to provide fertiliser security for New
Zealand's farming industry. Most rock phosphate fertiliser is imported from
Morocco. It is high in cadmium, involves high transport costs and has a
significant carbon footprint.

Chatham Rise rock phosphate, as an ultra-low cadmium direct-application
fertiliser, has also proven to be at least as effective as processed
fertilisers while drastically reducing the run-off effects on New Zealand
waterways.